Taking multivitamins can be beneficial to health for people who don’t get the proper nutrients from a balanced diet. Many people find it difficult to eat a balanced and healthy diet, and multivitamins can help fill the nutritional gaps.

For more information about multivitamins, see this set of reference articles.

https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Mvms-HealthProfessional/

https://nutritionj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1475-2891-13-72

http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/152/2/149.full

Many Americans do not eat enough fruits and vegetables. The USDA recommends three to five daily servings of vegetables, and two to four servings of fruit. In fact, the 2015 – 2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans propose half of your plate at any given meal should be fruits and veggies. If you are not eating fruits and vegetables, there is a chance you may be deficient in certain vitamins and minerals, which can be corrected by supplementing with vitamins or a multivitamin.

Oral contraceptives, also commonly referred to as birth control pills, are a class of prescription drugs taken to prevent pregnancy. Oral contraceptives may be a combination of the hormone estrogen and a progestin (synthetic progesterone) or a progestin alone. The most commonly used agents are a combination of estrogen and progestin and have efficacy of approximately 99.9%, when used as directed.

While effective in preventing pregnancy, oral contraceptives can have negative consequences such as drug interactions, adverse effects on health status, and nutrient depletion. It has been shown that key nutrient depletions of concern may be vitamin B2, folic acid, vitamin B6, vitamin B12, vitamin C, vitamin E, magnesium, selenium and zinc. If you take OCPs, you may want to consider a multivitamin.